Click to Harvest!

Fantasy Facebook RPG Castle Age announced a free fan appreciation event this week, with free Favor Points (the game’s premium currency) up for grabs.

The promotion is pretty simple. On the game’s free gifts tab, there is a new Favor Mystery Gift that players can send to their Castle Age neighbors. Once received, the gift will award the recipient a random number of Favor Points, from 20 a max of 1000. This Favor Mystery gift can only be redeemed one time per player, to prevent stockpiling free Favor Points.

What did you spend your free Favor Points on? Leave a comment and let us know!

Cafe World developer Zynga has finally given chefs a few new spices to work with! The Spice Rack feature launched several months ago to much fanfare, but since then it has largely been untouched. Zynga fixed that today, giving players three brand new spices.

Mastery Mint gives players+1 additional mastery when cooking a dish. 12 Hour Thyme reduces a dish’s cooking time by (you guessed it) 12 hours. Lastly, there is a mysterious Magic Spice. Zynga isn’t spilling the beans on what its effect is. If anyone has the scoop, leave a comment below and let us know!

Mafia Wars developer Zynga is giving players a chance to take a break from Las Vegas, and practice their boss fighting skills. Players have ten days to defeat Agent Karlin, Agent Miller, D.E.A. Iverson, and D.A. Embry. The Mafia Wars fan page has a full description of the event, so we’ll let them do the talking for us:

“Are you ready for the Mafia Wars Boss Fight Event? Starting this Friday, you’ll get your chance to beat the Feds! For 10 days, you’ll be taking on 4 bosses with the help of your mafia, and will work on earning a coveted mastery item for Las Vegas. The bosses will each have 3 levels for you to beat. Once you beat them all at the first level, you progress to the next level to continue fighting for your mastery. Each level you complete will give you a special reward, so be sure to finish them all to claim all the prizes!

If you want to pack a solid punch, you can prepare for battle by making sure you have plenty of consumables like health kits, shivs, and stun guns to help you along the way. There’s also safety in numbers – go recruit some new members to your mafia before the battle begins to better your odds of victory.”

Social City developer Playdom has updated the in-game item raffle, with a new water park mega building up for grabs. To obtain the new water park, players first need to collect all eight parts.

Each time a player spins the wheel in the in-game newspaper, they will receive one of the eight Water Park pieces, chosen at random. Each spin costs 8 City Bucks, meaning players will be spending a minimum of 64 CB$ (about $12) to get this attraction, and potentially much more, if they have unlucky raffle wheel spins.

Personally, we aren’t big fans of this raffle format. We think a good rule of thumb is to only allow games of chance in social game elements involving in-game currency. Once real cash is involved, it makes us uneasy that some players will spend much more money obtaining an item than others.

Every time we think social game developers must surely be running out of expansion themes, one of them does something so off-the-wall that we realize the expansion idea well will likely never run dry. Playfish is the most recent example, releasing a collection of bowling themed items in Restaurant City this week.

New decorations include: bowling lane floor tiles, oversized bowling pins and balls, bowling sign, waitress, bowling lane table, and more.

The item collection isn’t as extensive as some that have hit Restaurant City, but Playfish has made up for this lack of volume with an elaborate fully-animated Bowling Alley prop. Players can actually see their customers bowling strikes or gutter balls, and can earn some extra cash with the decoration. To unlock it, players must fully master the new PFC Family Bucket recipe.